Last year, the film Red Tails shined a light on the oft-forgotten story of the Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black group of fighter pilots during World War II. Despite the inspirational story, many were a bit perturbed by the lack of black women in the film. While black women were an integral part of that time period and supported their husbands, sons, brothers, and other men in the war effort, their stories have been overlooked, until now.

Gregory S. Cooke, producer and director the forthcoming documentary Invisible Warriors, aims to tell the story the black women during the World War II era. Inspired by his mother, who worked in the U.S. Patent Office during the war, Cooke set out to document the plight of black women like his mother during that time.

Invisible Warriors: African American Women in World War II features the powerful recollections of pioneers — Black women who fought for their civil rights, and who empowered themselves while working in war production, government offices, and in the U.S. military.

Mary McLeod Bethune’s personal relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt and direct access to the President, were responsible for creating employment opportunities for 600,000 Black women. On the home front, African American women escaped the stunting shackles of poverty, sharecropping and lives as domestics to become “Rosie the Riveters” and government employees. Barriers in the U.S. military fell as Black women volunteered for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), Army Nurse Corps, SPARS (Coast Guard), and WAVES (Navy). They served in outposts as far-flung as England, Liberia, and New Guinea. African American women’s wartime military service helped to end racial segregation in the armed forces in 1948.

Invisible Warriors features interviews with several women and scholars including the late Dr. Dorothy Height, former president of the National Council of Negro Women.

It never ceases to amaze me how people intentionally refuse to “get it” – the hoopla over Red Tails hd nothing to do with wanting to see Black women as soldiers, bt rather had to do with the absence of Black women as the absolutely main supporters of the Tuskegee Airmen – as family, lovers, wives, girlfriends, – nd the falsifiction of history with the addition of a fictitious white love interest. Not only that, the outcry ws about the obvious attempts in Hollywood to continue to push the separation and division of Black women and men.

It’s great if a documentary is being made about Black women in the armed services, but that fact had very little to do with the Red Tails outcry – don’t mix apples and oranges.

Shepherd

It’s funny how black people/women/minorities are inferior until people need them to do something for them. And after that they choose to keep it quiet. Women in World War Two built Waterloo Bridge in London and Black women are currently the fastest growing demographic in the US military and there are actually more black women serving than white women. No one talks about that either…